Jeb Bush in the brambles

Several presidential elections ago, when a majority of voters still favored the Iraq War, John Kerry clumsily explained his position by declaring that he’d voted in favor of $87 million in war funding before he voted against it. The quote quickly became a symbol of his flagrant flip-flopping and reflected the incoherence of the position put forth by the Democratic presidential ticket: They would neither embrace nor repudiate the most consequential war in a generation.

As Election 2016 approaches, Jeb Bush is making a similar mistake.

Asked on Fox News if he would have authorized the Iraq invasion “knowing what we know now,” he told Megyn Kelly, “I would have. And so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody, and so would have almost everybody who was confronted with the intelligence.” It would take him four days of stumbling to claim that he had misinterpreted the question, clarifying that had he known that no weapons of mass destruction would be found in the country, “I would not have engaged. I would not have gone into Iraq.”

So why isn’t he an outspoken critic of the war?

Unwilling to fully embrace or condemn his brother George’s judgment, he is stuck telling Americans that he thought the war was a good idea before he recognized that it was a bad idea. Perhaps that’s the truth. But especially when his stance is stated haltingly and unwillingly across several interviews, it doesn’t inspire confidence that he’ll make the right call next time. After all, lots of politicians recognized flaws in the Iraq intelligence circa 2003, and some even foresaw that, WMDs or no, an occupation of Iraq would be disastrous.

Jeb Bush’s stumbles on Iraq are rooted in a larger failure of the Republican Party establishment to coalesce around a coherent position on the war. No one is eager to spend their time defending the conflict. Even in a GOP primary, a majority of voters now regard it as a mistake. But neither are they willing to forthrightly acknowledge that it was folly, despite the fact that it killed more Americans than 9/11, cost trillions and helped give rise to ISIS. It is easily the most disastrous foreign policy decision since Vietnam.

And, while former supporters find that difficult to acknowledge, attempts to elide that truth will only hurt the party in presidential elections against Iraq war critics, much as being anti-war helped Barack Obama to beat Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Mitt Romney.

Of course, with the Democrats poised to nominate Hillary Clinton, who also voted for the Iraq War, their advantage on the issue will be blunted. “I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had,” she wrote in her autobiography, “Hard Choices.” “And I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong.”

A noninterventionist like Rand Paul could attack her on the issue. Yet Clinton’s forthright acknowledgement of error compares favorably to Marco Rubio’s insistence that invading Iraq was the right thing to do; and it is better than Jeb Bush’s admission that “mistakes were made,” a cartoonishly evasive formulation, and his statement, reported by AP, that “I’m not going to go out of my way to say that my brother did this wrong or my dad did this wrong. It’s just not going to happen. I have a hard time with that. I love my family a lot.”

I do not believe that love or family loyalty requires a person to refrain from publicly disagreeing with a position taken by a father or brother. But if Jeb Bush does feel that way, he simply cannot be president.

Americans need a leader who shares his or her honest assessments and formulates policy based on dispassionate analysis of what’s best for the country.

Neither can be squared with avoiding a predecessor’s legacy because he’s family, especially for a man related to two former presidents. As Amy Davidson put it, “Delicacy in this case is the enemy of democracy.” And the indelicate truth is that faulty intelligence was not the only significant error that the Bush administration made.

An earlier problem was the Bush team’s determination to attack Iraq, of all countries, after 9/11.

As Peter Beinart, who once favored the war, put it, “George W. Bush was not forced to invade Iraq because of the weight of objective evidence about WMD. He and his top advisers shamelessly hyped that evidence to justify a war they were seeking an excuse to launch. And in the hysterical aftermath of Sept. 11, Congress was too cowed to effectively challenge them.”

Then there were the later failures the Bush administration presided over, like Abu Ghraib. Would Jeb Bush staff his White House with the same people who made those mistakes?

Americans need a forthright answer, not a man who hides behind not criticizing his brother.

Lots of different issues will shape Election 2016. There are Iraq hawks who say that what happened back in 2003 is beside the point, and that we ought to be focusing on Iran and ISIS. In the neoconservative magazine Commentary, Noah Rothman wrote under the headline, “America Needs a Commander in Chief, not a Historian,” that “Republicans are wandering into a trap by attempting to assuage the journalistic establishment’s insatiable desire to see Republicans repent for the last GOP president’s nation-building exercise in Iraq.”

But repentance isn’t the point at all. American voters are intent on never again squandering trillions of dollars and thousands of lives on an imprudent war of choice. For that reason, they are averse to electing anyone who isn’t even able to recognize a war like that in hindsight.

It’s hard to imagine an easier litmus test, yet Jeb Bush had even more trouble passing it than did Hillary Clinton, despite the fact that she actually voted for the war.

Surely the GOP can field a candidate who better articulates a sound foreign policy. And if it hopes to win Election 2016, it must find a candidate more adept at the relevant politics.

Opinion columnist Conor Friedersdorf also is a staff writer for the Atlantic.

WRITE A LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Letters to the Editor: E-mail to letters@ocregister.com.
Please provide your name, city and telephone number (telephone numbers will not be published).
Letters of about 200 words or videos of 30-seconds
each will be given preference. Letters will be edited for length, grammar and clarity.

User Agreement

Keep it civil and stay on topic. No profanity, vulgarity, racial
slurs or personal attacks. People who harass others or joke about
tragedies will be blocked. By posting your comment, you agree to
allow Orange County Register Communications, Inc. the right to
republish your name and comment in additional Register publications
without any notification or payment.